Help wanted

I originally conceived of Ouroboros as a community weblog for biogerontologists — which meant, primarily, that it would serve the community, but it was also my hope that others within the community would want to pitch in. So far so good on the primary mission, but I’ve been remiss in recruiting other biologists to contribute to the content on the web site. Furthermore, as I get busier and busier with science, it gets harder and harder to stay on top of the literature, and the primary mission sometimes suffers as well.

So: Do you want to write for Ouroboros? The three main criteria are as follows:

Be a working scientist in a field relevant to the biology of aging.

Have strong English writing skills, and a perfectionist streak about your prose.

Be willing and able to commit to writing a ~500-word post based on a recent journal article about the biology of aging, around once a week.

Ideally I’d like to have several writers take on “beats”, i.e., topics that they cover regularly and comprehensively — so you might end up covering Alzheimer’s, sirtuins, or whatever floats your boat. Hopefully your choice of subject would be a subfield in which you have some formal expertise, though that’s not a requirement (clearly, I’m mostly dealing in subjects in which I have no training other than my general biological background).

If you’re not interested in writing but are still interested in pitching in, there’s another job to be filled: “beach-comber.” I follow the literature through a system of PubMed RSS feeds, but I don’t scour the journals’ tables of contents as thoroughly or rapidly as I’d like. So there’s definitely room for a few folks to comb through the ToCs of journals as they’re released (especially for the “advance online” contents, which often aren’t indexed by PubMed yet), and flag relevant articles as they become available. I have some thoughts about how to divide up that task.